CatBus;337204 Wrote: > Honestly not sure myself, but I can hypothesize. The whole point of MP3 > transcoding is to better accomodate limited bandwidth, or more typically > a highly variable bandwidth.
There are also other scenarios. One is streaming to your workplace, where you don't want to hog too much of your company's incoming bandwidth (or raise flags with the IT staff). Another is if you pay a metered price for bandwidth. In either scenario, you may want to set a bitrate well below the maximum sustainable by the connection. > In a simple "dedicated player with a flaky wireless connection" > scenario, if the minimum possible available bandwidth is X, then it > makes sense that X should be the maximum possible bitrate. But if you > use vanilla ABR or VBR, you don't know what the maximum bitrate is, so > you can't guarantee the stream will work. > > So if you want to guarantee a certain amount of headroom, you have to > use CBR or set a hard upper limit on the ABR or VBR, otherwise you may > get odd bitrate spikes that may exceed the network's capacity. ABR has worked surprisingly well. Given the buffering on the receiving end you can easily permit some (or many) frames to be encoded above the set bitrate. The thing with setting _any_ bitrate when trying to maximize the rate to fit the given connection is that you just have to use trial and error. My home Comcast connection used to be 768 kbps outbound, yet I was unable to stream reliably at 256kbps. Maybe 1/2 the time it would work that speed. But it was too much trouble to keep changing it, so I just left it at 192 kbps. If this really was the concern (and ABR was failing for these reasons) then the better solution would be to go back to using CBR, where the quality will be better at a given bitrate due to the way the bit reservoir is used in CBR (and ABR). -- JJZolx Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=52045 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/beta
